If important things are not done to protect women's sports at UConn far into the future, it will not only be on the school and the state, it will be on the powers of collegiate athletics and, yes, the most powerful women in the nation.

Recently, in the middle of talking about goalkeeping and how smart her roommate and goal-scoring machine Charlotte Veitner is on the UConn field hockey team, Klein stopped and smiled. She talked about a conversation with her mom and how they discussed how lucky she was to have a chance to play with wonderful young women from various countries and how they bonded to form such a powerhouse program.

Watching UConn's field hockey Final Four victory over North Carolina, I thought about that conversation. Klein was brilliant pushing the Huskies into the national championship game. She made 13 saves. She stopped Ashley Hoffman on a penalty stroke. When two overtimes couldn't decide the game, Klein saved all three shootout attempts by the ACC Tar Heels.

When the No. 1 UConn women's basketball team, with its 11 national championships and six perfect seasons, faces No. 15 Maryland at the XL Center Sunday, the UConn field hockey team, shooting for its fifth national championship, will simultaneously attempt to complete its first perfect season against the Big Ten Terps in Louisville.

A few hours after Klein had added one more brick to the wall of great athletic performances at UConn, Lobo looked high up on the Gampel Pavilion wall at a banner commemorating her induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame. UConn honored Lobo before the 82-47 victory over California. Another Hall of Famer, Geno Auriemma, presented Lobo her ring again.

"They better find room because there are going to be a lot more women's basketball players in the Hall of Fame," Lobo told the 8,103 fans.

Taurasi, Moore, Stewart, Charles, Bird, yes, there will, but here's the hard question. What happens after Geno Auriemma, 63, retires? What happens when the next coach looks around and says, whoa, this school is not among the collegiate power structure? How many players who eventually will find their way to Springfield will find their way to Storrs first?

Without Auriemma's coaching ability and charismatic force of personality, will UConn remain the predominant program in the nation? Forget predominant. Will UConn remain among the top five programs? Look at Tennessee after Pat Summitt. And Tennessee is in the SEC.

Let's not fool ourselves. The hundreds of millions of dollars from college football foot the bill for elite women's basketball. Facing Title IX requirements, the richest athletic departments pour money into the women's game because it is the one sport that generates a level of national interest and could give some investment return.

Some proof? The Power Five, 65 schools that form a cartel that somehow America has allowed to continue, have 14 of the 15 top-ranked teams in the latest AP basketball poll. On the men's side, four of the top 15 still are from outside. Without the need for 85 scholarships like football, some men's basketball programs outside the Cartel 65 still prosper.

So, on a weekend when UConn women's programs will shine brightly, I ask not only the state, but the NCAA and powerful women in this country: What are you going to do to make sure a school that has done as much for women's athletics as any doesn't erode, erode, erode in the 21st century?

There are the Williams sisters in tennis and the women's national soccer team. Who else has consistently brought more to U.S. female athletics in the past quarter century than UConn women's basketball?

"Everybody who is a fan of UConn athletics thinks about what's going to happen to this athletic program if they don't get into a Power Five," said Lobo, who is on the UConn Board of Trustees. "Do I worry about the UConn women in particular? Not as long as coach Auriemma is here. I don't see anything but championship contenders every season. But when you look at the athletic department globally, everyone would love to see them in a Power Five."

Lobo stopped. "You're going to get me in trouble," she said.

People like Condoleezza Rice, who has been named to chair a national committee that supposedly is going to drain the swamp that is men's college basketball, should think more broadly. Shouldn't people like Rice and Lisa Borders and Billie Jean King and powerful women in corporate America also look out for those who have done it right? Those who graduate virtually everybody, who win and bring honor to sport? What kind of pressure can they bear on the NCAA and the Power Five who hoard all the football money?

They should be pushing the ACC or Big Ten to immediately put UConn women's sports, at least women's basketball, in their conference. Actually, putting the women's basketball and field hockey in the ACC should have been done yesterday. And there should be a nice piece of that conference TV money that can go to UConn to help pay for those spots.

There seems nothing can stop the Power Five from shafting the dozen or so schools that pay big-time money in without getting big-time money back. And if the NCAA is powerless to punish North Carolina for its academic scandal and the ACC shrugs, what makes me think this is possible? If Louisville cheats until it stinks and the ACC stands by Louisville, what makes me think this is possible?

You got me. But I'm a man. That's why the powerful women in and around sports should not stand around and allow the women's half of the UConn athletic department get caught up in the erosion that is killing UConn, Cincinnati, etc.

"We're fortunate hockey could get into Hockey East," Auriemma said. "That might have to be the model going forward. An individual program tries to align with schools that want to compete at the level you want to compete. But, man, great men's college basketball programs are going to be sacrificed at the altar of college football. If they'll do it to those people, it's trickle-down economics."

This is a weekend when UConn football enters Fenway Park as a 21-point underdog to Boston College and its coach says he doesn't recruit against UConn. Because? "We're in the ACC," Steve Addazio said. "If you're a good player, you want to play at the highest level of football."

Those words upset a lot of UConn fans. BC blocked UConn's entrance into the ACC. BC hasn't won diddly in football and basketball. But you know what? Addazio is right. And that sucks for Connecticut.

Does that mean UConn women's programs have to erode, too? Think about it, Condoleezza and Billie Jean.